The President has been giving mixed messages about how long the operation in Iran will last. He has refused to rule out boots on the ground and has refused to commit to a timeline, insisting that he will have a say in who rules Iran going forward. To Trump, being more explicit on any of these issues would be tipping his hand. He wants the Iranian regime to believe he has a limitless capacity to damage them, because this makes it more likely that they will surrender and corporate.
The truth is, the President’s military capabilities far outstrip his political ones. He won the 2024 election in part because he made clear that he recognized how our failed adventurism in the Middle East had been prohibitively costly in treasure and human life, and did not yield the results that the neocons had promised. Trump promised no new wars, and while the cause of ridding the planet of the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran is a righteous one, I’d say the President has about two or three weeks to complete the mission before the robust support he currently has from his base starts to recede. Americans on both sides of the aisle have no appetite for another endless exercise in nation building, and if the price of gas continues to go up, this could seriously hurt the President in the midterms.
This may become a point of divergence from Israel, our great ally in the region.
The Israelis have been incredible allies in this endeavor. The cooperation between our militaries is unprecedented in the history of American warfare. The Israelis took out the men behind the assassination attempts on Trump’s life, for which we should all be grateful. But even though our interests are aligned here, they are not identical by any means.
The Israelis seem to be preparing for a longer war. They really want a deep-seated regime change. They want to see the protesters or somebody representing them come into government, and of course, one understands why. Iran has posed a direct and immediate threat to Israeli lives for decades and is committed to actively wiping Israel off the face of the earth. It funded the October 7 pogrom that left a thousand Israelis dead and 250 kidnapped and tortured in Gaza.
But the cost of an Iraq-style regime change war is just not something the American electorate is willing to subsidize anymore. We’ve got our own problems! Americans are done with nation building, done exporting Western-style democracy.
We all want the protestors to win. The question is whether a Western-supported government installed in Iran would be materially different enough when it comes to protecting American lives from a pro-American version of the current Islamic Regime to justify boots on the ground.
To me, the answer right now is no. And from everything I’ve heard the President say over the past four weeks makes me think he agrees.
I don’t think the President is pursuing nation building in Iran. I think what he’d like to see is a Dulcy Rodriguez figure, someone who is recognized by the current regime yet has a pro-American posture and is willing to commit to not oppressing, imprisoning, and torturing its own people and to not pursuing nuclear enrichment. I think the President hopes that given the chance to breathe, the protest movement would be able to assemble a coherent political formation from which to seize its freedom. And more importantly, the point of this war is to get a nuclear deal in place that binds Iran for decades to come.
Naturally, the Ayatollah Khamenei’s son, who is being floated by the regime to replace his father, is a total non-starter. But that doesn’t mean that the President is looking for somebody who’s going to institute Western-style institutions in Iran tomorrow.
We can—and we should—separate decapitating a regime that is hostile to us and pursuing nuclear arms from the kind of nation-building investments we erroneously pursued in the Middle East during the Bush and Obama years. But that’s what it seems to me the Israelis want: a much deeper form of regime change than President Trump is willing to pursue right now, not because the President doesn’t want to see the protesters win—of course he does—but because he has to put America first and keep his campaign promises, and that means a much more limited operation.
So who is going to decide how long the war lasts?
We are, obviously. We’re the superpower.
The President may not be willing to show his hand here, but I will be very shocked if there are American boots on the ground in Iran. That’s just unthinkable in terms of what this President has promised the American people and with the midterms coming up.
Israel’s army chief is telling the Israeli public to prepare for a war that takes a long time. But the President is not going to allow the interests of another country, even a close ally like Israel, to override his America First agenda.
